


Near Kinsman

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Western, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:13:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22873051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: Rey has her own personal reasons for answering that anonymous bachelor's advertisement in the heart-and-hand mail-order bride catalog, but the respectable Mr. Brigadier General Benjamin Solo needn't find out such trifling details.(The big fat pack of lies Rey has to tell him about herself is besides the point. Anything is better than being a nobody.)
Relationships: Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 80
Kudos: 479





	Near Kinsman

**Author's Note:**

> Or, the 19th-century American Western mail-order bride AU nobody asked me for, but thank you for reading anyway.

…

1.

She finds the old broadside heart-and-hand catalog beneath a heap of stinking kitchen scraps, amidst the apple cores and potato peels and pork bones and burnt-black crusts of cornbread; the page has been wrapped around several cutthroat trout heads and Rey must hold the paper up against the light so she can read what its grease-blotted newsprint says. It is dated from April of last year. 

_Bachelor, 30, tolerable appearance, seeks a Wife. My house has a sound roof with an iron cooking range and a blackberry bush. Correspondence details below._

Rey folds the advertisement into her pocket and spits the fish heads on a two-pronged fork for roasting.

The ink, dip-pen and packet of cream-colored foolscap paper upon which she composes her reply costs Rey two bits, all told, which is her full week’s wages at the Jakku Gulch Copper Mine; its pit boss Mr. Plutt still bears a scar in his anvil-thick left hand from where Rey shot him twice with her pepperbox revolver, the second shot mostly to serve as confirmation that her first was not an accident. She threshes her way through five miles of mesquite thicket up the valley from Niima Outpost into Tatooine City and postmarks her letter from the office there. 

_Dear Bachelor-With-the-Blackberry-Bush,_

_I am in receipt of your advertisement in the Chandrila Home Companion and am desirous of initiating a correspondence with a mind to discerning matrimony._

_I am an orphan from a respectable Boston family but am teaching school here in Tatooine City as a means of supporting myself and have been the recipient of a good education. I will be 21 in the summer. I like houses with sound roofs and iron cookstoves, although you neglected to mention the condition of your floor and thus I can only presume the aforementioned blackberry bush is growing outside your house rather than in it. Other things I like are silk ribbons, key-stem pocketwatches, thimbles, the sound of a locomotive whistle, spiced hot chocolate with lemon peel, and all sundry kinds of wildflowers._

_My name is Regan Skywalker but I am called Rey by my friends and acquaintances._

This name, Rey decides, really is the beatingest piece of genius she ever devised, bolted together from a wonderfully peculiar surname on one of those high-falutin bronze plaques in the Outer Rim County courthouse — why she had been there in the first place is nobody’s damn funeral — and the given name from a book of theater plays. Rey does not know which role Regan takes in Mr. Shakespeare’s story but knows for certain she is a princess, since her name appears just below King Lear’s on the _dramatis personae_ page as one of his daughters. 

She has never actually tasted hot chocolate with lemon peel but once lapped its remnants from a broken china teacup and figures it is the same general idea.

Rey seals her envelope with callused fingers — they have each been broken at least once; her ribs show like barrel hoops under her skin; she wears her dingy brown hair in three knots to hide the fact that she cuts it herself with a boot knife; her complexion is vinegar-rough from heat and work and want and coarsened further by the smallpox scars nearly as old as she is; a newer scar on her upper right arm looks like two grasping hands — and she sends off the message by full-speed. 

…

2.

Rey has decided, after much contemplation done mostly while sheltering from dust storms in the vestibules of white stone churches, that her parents have gone to San Francisco. 

It is not a conclusion that would bear close scrutiny and Rey has reached it more by prophetic intuition than a process of serious reasoning, which out here in the New Mexico Territory desert — in any desert, really— is good enough for just about anyone. San Francisco is roundly regarded as the prettiest place in the West, there as it is beside the ocean into which the sun sinks each day after its three-thousand mile journey from the forests down over the plains and up over the mountains, and so here is where Rey imagines them. 

But San Francisco is a long way. By train her surest bet it is up, up, up from Santa Fe on the Denver & Rio Grande Northwestern and then over, over, over on the Union Pacific, a journey that would cost Rey more money than she has scraped together in the course of ten years inside a floral-print pasteboard bandbox, where she additionally keeps a faded red shoddy cloth doll, a soldier’s kepi hat she found in a dry creek bed and several two-penny notebooks filled with nothing but penciled tally marks. 

It also happens to be the same railroad route along which Bachelor, 30, has marked his address to be, the town of Falcon’s Run in the Wyoming Territory off the clear eastern fork of the Wayfinder River; by Rey’s estimation the train fare this far would carry her more than half-way to her intended destination. 

It seems an all-fired rotten trick to play on a man, even one dumb enough to advertise himself in a mail-order bride catalog upon the merits of his kitchenware, but then he ought to have listed honesty as one of his requisite desired traits in a future wife. He had not listed any. 

Rey visits the Tatooine City post office every Saturday and in six weeks there is a letter waiting for her. It has been composed in an exquisite, eccentric hand and is a single page long. 

_Dear Miss Regan, called Rey —_

_I thank you both for your letter and your patience, if you were waiting. I realize I have been some time at composing my answer but I believe this place would be to your liking. Among our wildflowers are the following — blue columbine, evening primrose, perennial sunflower, purple prairie clover, desert prince’s plume, fire chalice and dotted blazing star._

_These do not bloom all in the same season but are presented to give you an illustrative picture._

_Yours Sincerely,_

_Brigadier General B. Solo, called Ben_

Rey carries the letter pinned to the breast of her sack coat for more than a week before she can decide what she will say.

…

3\. 

Each of his subsequent letters after one this grows longer; Rey’s remain about the same length. 

She pickpockets details from her life and festoons them with imaginative fictions as necessary, repurposing her stories as things that have happened to other, less sophisticated people — I once watched a steamboat deck hand try chucking a fice-dog little girl overboard for not paying her fare and he got bitten for his troubles; there was a fight down at the mining camps last week and I am told some scrawny tramp woman knocked three rowdies at once into a cocked hat with her shovel — and occasionally she changes the endings to improve their punchlines. 

She sends him the jubilant purple-pink blossoms off a walkingstick cactus, a long feather from the impertinent tail on a chaparral bird, a rose-gold pebble of native copper, and one evening she even scrubs her head with Mother Maz’s No. 11 Carbolic Disinfecting Soap so she can send him a lock of her dull, brittle hair. The hair he sends in return is as soft as the fluff inside a cattail plant and as true-black as the coat on a prize-purse racehorse. 

She buys a new two-penny notebook and drafts her letters here first before writing them onto the foolscap paper; if she must make a lie of her life, she would at least like its details to be consistent. 

_Rey Skywalker,_ she signs herself, each time. _Rey Skywalker. Rey Skywalker._

Brigadier General Benjamin Solo, called Ben, stands six feet three inches tall with a fair complexion, yellow-brown eyes, and ears as prominent as those on a pronghorn antelope, or so he describes them. He is a lousy checkers player and a worse dancer but is accounted a good rider, a better swordfighter, a crack-shot with a pistol and a fair-to-middling violinist. Privately Rey has always viewed this instrument as a fiddle with all the spirit and spitfire tortured out of it but refrains from commentary on this point and discloses instead that she can play the harmonica, recalling only after she has posted her letter that this is not considered a ladylike avocation. 

Ben’s reply simply asks if she knows a certain song; he has never heard the title, or else has heard it and forgotten, but remembers it starts with a verse about a girl who is as fair as the River Shannon and purer than its waters. 

Rey does, in fact, know the song; it is called “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” 

During the War of the Rebellion he rose to the rank of brigadier general within the Union army’s Black Coats Brigade, a title its men earned on account of the brutalizing casualties they sustained under fire, but then old John Brown had foretold that the crimes of this guilty land could never be purged away but with blood and someone, Ben supposes, would have needed to supply it, one way or another. He served a Major General who was named Palpatine but known better to his soldiers as The Emperor; this had not, it seems, been intended as a compliment. He was wounded at the Battle of Antietam and again at the Battle of the Wilderness — he does not tell Rey where, or in what way — and keeps his officer’s saber at the bottom of a locked trunk, a red silk tassel on its handle and engravings on its carbon steel blade. Its custom sheath is inlaid with silver.

 _The postmaster here in Falcon’s Run is a man named Finn,_ Ben says. _He was with the 29th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, which he and I have determined would place us both at the Siege of Petersburg together. His wife came up from a rock-salt mining town in Nevada to be our telegraph operator — her name is Rose. They like to have a joke at my expense whenever there is a new letter from you, but I am not quite so narrow as to begrudge them their fun._

_I hope you do not mind that I have told them about you._

His plow horse is a shaggy Kashyyyk heavy-draft named Chewie with a disposition as contrary and satiric as the course of the Mississippi River. His rooster Pieter Petrus Platevoet, called Threepio, minces about the yard with an air of genteel indignation while his ram, Beta Arietis, called Artoo, seems to have set a perpetual enmity between himself and Ben’s backside. Ben holds a degree in theology from Coruscant College in upstate New York — one of his professors was a man he refers to as Dr. S. Oakes: a friend, Ben says, except not truly — and he attended the Papist seminary school down in Baltimore but left at age twenty-three, several months before the war began. He has a temper he carries in his brain like a load of canister-shot and there is a red cedar stump out behind his house that he scourges with a splitting maul whenever this anger takes him in its thrall. 

_I have decided there are only three possible fates for it and I,_ Ben says, _which are that I destroy it, it destroys me, or that we make our peace with one another after a fashion — the third answer has been slower in coming to me than the first two and I am still learning what it means._

He writes Greek and Latin and can manage some Spanish, though not nearly as much as Rey, who writes out ballads for him and explains their translations. He likes the plays of Sophocles and the poetry of John Donne; Rey barters with a local schoolboy — she gets his classroom primers while the boy, in trade, gets the shaker Rey has cut off a dead rattlesnake’s tail — so she can quote a line from _Philoctetes_ , O, my friends, will you then stay? 

Rey herself enjoys dime-novel adventures, serial mysteries and romantic storypapers but cannot tell him this, exactly, and therefore settles for saying she likes them ironically; Ben speculates with her about the pending next installment of Mr. Dickens’ _The Mystery of Edwin Drood._

He tells her that he often has unquiet dreams and goes out to sleep in the hayloft, some nights, because here the walls do not feel so close and the darkness does not feel so personal. 

_I have dreams too,_ Rey writes. _I dream of islands in the ocean. I dream of battlefields under gray rain. I dream of pine forests filled with snow and of a knight in black armor — I ask him to take off his helmet for me but I always wake up before he can manage it._

 _I think this is awfully ungentlemanly of him and I will tell the scoundrel as much when next I see him._

Ben’s grandfather was a sharpshooter with Dan Morgan’s rifle company, during the Revolution, and went slightly mad after the passing of his wife; his uncle was a Presbyterian army chaplain with the 1st Minnesota; his mother was a suffragette who was brought up in New York City high society and dabbled in four different religions before settling finally on Spiritualism, due largely to her delight at bamboozling the scientific investigators and oh-ye-of-little-faithers who came to her seances in the front parlor; his father was a blockade-runner out of Veracruz during the Mexican War, aboard a composite clipper ship to which he gave the unlikely title _Freya’s Cloak_ , and owned a pair of gilt-painted gambler’s dice he carried around on a chain in place of a watch. 

All of them are dead.

 _It is a strange thing,_ Ben writes. _At times I find myself very much alone; at others I seem to see and hear and feel them everywhere, in everything. I came out here to let past things die and now I find them even within myself._

Rey is seated on the flats above Niima Outpost when she reads this. She looks away down the long valley to the mountains, turned a pale dreaming blue by the vast distance; she writes her answer directly onto the foolscap paper. 

_I understand,_ she says. _I have felt just the same way._

…

4\. 

The envelope that arrives in early August is slightly thicker than the others, sealed with red wax, and although Rey knows what it will contain she must marshal her willpower three different times towards the irrevocable act of opening it; inside is three hundred dollars in crisp twenty-dollar banknotes and a letter that has been bound to them by a brass paper fastener.

_Rey,_

_I sold the saber in Denver — the piece of junk fetched me a better price than I hoped for, which I suppose proves that even my inveterate cynicism is liable to let me down on occasion. Herein should be money sufficient for your passage and whatever else you may need._

_Send a telegram by Western Union on the day of your departure and I will be waiting for you at the station in Falcon’s Run._

_Yours Sincerely,_

_Ben Solo_

Rey stares at the letter, at the money, and when she makes it back through the waste of briers to Niima Outpost she stares at her reflection in the green-painted glass their undertaker has hung in his front windowpanes; she studies the bony spareness of her arms, the penurious and loveless narrowness of her starved body, the hungering hollowness of her cheeks and eyes and the wreckage of what might have otherwise been the face of a pretty young woman. The night is unseasonably cold and Rey curls herself under the porch of an inn to cry until she falls asleep.

She dreams she has been cast to the bottom of the mine and is lying there with a shattered back, so far down inside the deep and the dark that nobody will hear her calling out and therefore Rey does not bother. The mine shaft goes straight up to the night sky and she can see its trackless, glittering black overhead, the stars and the planets and the red nebula burning within Orion’s sword. The red of it changes as she watches; it turns the eruptive white of creation and brightens until its far-traveling light is there with her, down inside the abyss, and here it takes the shape of a man clothed in black. He wears an ordinary body just as broken as hers and he crumples down silent against the stones. He tries twice to stand but fails. 

Stop, Rey tries to tell him. Stop, please. You are hurting yourself. 

The man tries a third time; he rises as far as his knees; he comes to her in this manner, lifts her into his arms, and at the touch of his hands Rey wakes up. 

Her cheeks are wet. 

She dries them and uses the rest of her fine, spotless paper to write her next letter. 

My parents came here from Liverpool as steerage-class passengers, she begins. I was six years old and cannot remember what my name was meant to be, except that it began with the eighteenth letter of the alphabet; I have gone by Rhea like the mother of Zeus, Renata like the daughter of Emperor Ferdinand the Second, Rebekah like the wife of Issac and Rachel like the wife of Jacob whom God called Israel, and each of these names has no doubt been as wrong as another but it has not mattered because each time I have really been just Rey. 

My parents landed at Galveston and ran out of money on their way to San Antonio and sold me when they reached a town in Wharton County called Egypt, which I have always figured is a little amusing, and then they kept on going or maybe they didn’t. I will never know. 

What I do know is that I have searched all my life for them, have waited all my life for them to realize their mistake and understand how much they still want me despite everything. I have waited all this time for them to come back for me, to come looking for me, and I have understood for a good long while that they never will. I will never know what the man they sold me to intended for me, either, because I caught the smallpox and he left me at a hospital in New Orleans to die but I didn’t and have gone on in this same fashion of not-dying ever since. I have earned money by washing laundry and scrubbing floors and carting coal and shoveling stables and chopping cotton and scavenging scrap and digging gold, silver, copper, tin and lead. I have lied and cheated and stolen and been hurt in just about every way I suppose it is possible for a person to be and still be a person, at the end. One night in San Elizario on the Rio Grande there was a man with a knife and we fought and by the end the man was dead and my arm was bleeding so much it turned my sleeve red. The scar it made looks like two hands readying to touch, or maybe they are letting go. 

I do not know what hot chocolate with lemon peel tastes like.

I am a nobody from nowhere with nothing and I could not very well tell you that in a letter, could I, because what else would there be for me to say, but out of all the advertisements on that catalog page you were the only man who used the word _seeks_ instead of the word _wants._ I have your letters saved in a bandbox and they will be my greatest, my most favorite treasures, all the days of my life, however long that life should prove to be, and for this I wished to thank you, Ben Solo. 

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. 

Be happy. 

She folds her letter up around the money, presses it to her heart — a strange rush goes through her, like a great trilling flutter of sparrows all taking flight at once from the entanglements of a thornbush — and sends it back to him. 

…

5.

_Rey_

_I am told my grandfather Anakin Skywalker liked the desert._

_I never met him, for myself, but purportedly he believed it was the only place quiet enough that he could hear the dead speaking to him, and although I can hear the dead speaking to me in all sorts of places I have never once doubted he was right._

_I believe there is still a courthouse somewhere down in your very own Outer Rim County that was dedicated to him with a bronze plaque when it was first constructed. It was a posthumous gift from his friend, Judge Benjamin Kenobi, for whom I happen to have been named._

_I had guessed at a possible explanation from your address — you may be angry with me for this; you are at liberty to be — but I was interested in discovering exactly what odd sort of woman would introduce herself by critiquing my syntax and telling me she liked locomotive whistles as well as wildflowers._

_The blazing star is in bloom here now, and if you will still have me then I will come to you and I will bring you home in time for you to see them._

_Yours_

_Ben_

…

6.

Rey hears the train while it is still a long ways off. The track’s steel rails sing and tremble with the reckless, thundering grandeur of its approach, from out of the early morning silence, and it makes the station’s lighted lantern sway overhead. 

She sits atop a bench wearing a new day dress made of sprigged white muslin and a new high-crowned hat trimmed with blue cloth periwinkles at its brim. She has scrubbed her face and hands and body ten times with the water heated in a frying pan, has daubed rosemary oil behind her ears and wrists, and although she still looks precisely like herself she is at least clean from head to foot. She wears her hat shoved down over hair she has declared beyond repair, beyond salvage, and has thus hewed away with a pair of scissors until it is almost as short as a man’s. 

But, she has determined, it will grow back. 

The train glides into the depot, breathing steam from its gears, and before it has come completely to a halt a tall, broad man in a black duster coat swings himself down onto the platform. 

There is a slight hitch to his step at the right side and a pair of gilt-painted gambler’s dice shines from a chain on his black waistcoat; he pockets them. He has a long irregular face that is mostly patrician nose and somber jaw with a pale scar that splits his features in two, like the crack through a mirror, the face of a man who had once prepared himself for a life in which he would have been summoned to give the dying their last rites when all other promises and hopes had failed. 

Rey removes her hat and stands. 

Then Benjamin Solo, called Ben, turns his head, and sees her, and he smiles as he comes forward nearly at a run to greet her. 

She opens her arms to receive him. 

…


End file.
